ABOUT THE NEW PLAY LAB:Just Theater’s New Play Lab commissions four Bay Area playwrights to work with four directors to develop full-length plays from initial conception to a staged reading of the first draft. The goal of the Lab is to create a distinctly collaborative artistic community to support playwrights in the critical early stage of the development of a new play.

Jonathan Spector's In From The Cold (developed in the '11/'12 Lab, premiered at Just Theater)

Each of the writers enters the lab with an idea for a play they want to write but have not yet begun. The entire lab meets roughly twice a month for six months. When a writer presents their work, it is read aloud from the beginning, with lab members serving as actors. The group then engages in a rigorous, playwright-driven discussion of the work. Because the lab members encounter the play multiple times over the course of the year, the discussions of the play and it’s development grow deeper as the lab progresses. As the play develops, the director/playwright teams also meet outside of the lab as they see fit. Over the course of six months, the writers complete the first draft of a new full-length play.Each of the plays is then presented to the public in a staged reading.

Since 2006 the Lab has grown to become one of the Bay Area's leading springboards for new work. Some of the thirty-five plays commissioned and developed in the Lab include Aaron Loeb's Ideation, which premiered at SF Playhouse and won the 2013 Glickman Award, Christopher Chen's Home Invasion which premiered with 6NewPlays in 2016, Andrew Saito's Mt. Misery which premiered at Cutting Ball Theater in 2013, Michelle Carter's Rose in America which premiered at Alter Theater in 2015, Lauren Gunderson's Toil and Trouble which premiered at Impact Theater in 2012, Erin Bregman's Before and After which was selected for the 2013 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Jonathan Spector's In From The Cold which was a winner of Aurora Theater's Global Age Prize and premiered with Just Theater in 2014.